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Hydro is a global company, with more than 35,000 employees, spread over operations in 40 countries, working together to create increasingly better aluminium solutions for more than 30,000 customers worldwide. Our businesses are divided into bauxite, alumina, energy, primary metal, laminated products and extruded solutions.
Bauxite and alumina represent the first two links in the aluminum value chain and the work to create and apply Lean 4.0 methodology (digital Lean) applied to the management system was developed at Mineraçao Paragominas S.A (MPSA), one of the largest mining bauxite in the world, located in the city of Paragominas, in the State of Pará, Brazil. (Fig 1)
Lean manufacturing or Lean Methodology, according to OHNO (2019), is a systematic method originating in the Japanese manufacturing industry in 1950, being created to minimise waste within a productive system without sacrificing its efficiency. Lean also takes into account the waste created by eight different natures, which: (1) defects, (2) excess production, (3) waiting, (4) intellectual waste, (5) transportation, (6) variation of inventory, (7) handling and (8) excess processing.
The Lean method considers work from the perspective of the customer who consumes a product or service, where "value" is any action or process for which a customer would be willing to pay, this concept is very important for the work in question, and can be observed at each stage, and clearly evidenced in the results presented.
Multinational companies have achieved great performance by incorporating Lean Manufacturing at the center of their corporate transformations. According to JORNAL DO COMERCIO (2019) companies such as CAT, Jhon Deere, Mary Kay, Avon, have achieved extraordinary gains in several performance indicators, from reducing absenteeism to optimizing the production process itself, using the methodology.
Seeking to reach the level of a Lean company, the work sought in Lean Digital the methodology to achieve, in a structured, continuous and stable way, improvement in the main indicators of MPSA.
According to LITTLE (2017), Lean companies continuously develop their capabilities and processes as part of their culture. Continuous improvement allows companies to align their activities flexibly, according to the business strategy. As a result of this alignment, these companies achieve relatively high-performance levels compared to their competitors.
By using this digital Lean methodology, it is expected to obtain more...